This week's project is a wet formed coin pouch. Wet forming leather can be a lot of fun so I've been looking around the house for things that would make for a good mold. I have a number of Altoid tins, so I used a small one to make little coin pouches. I think I'll try the larger tins at some point as well. More pictures of the finished pouches at the end of this post!

My parents are traveling to Japan, which was our home for over a decade. This is their first time back in 17 years, so these two pouches are for them. They'll need them to store all the coins for the ubiquitous Japanese vending machines, right?

I took the same approach as I did with the gum pouch, by first winging a rough draft pouch and then improving upon it. Over the course of making three pouches, you can see some progression of approach:

First I tried leather cord to keep the leather in place. Eh...

Then I remembered I have these things called clamps.

The third time, I placed one piece of leather cut to the curve of the tin under the clamps, grain side to grain side for the least amount of marking.

I formed the first pouch directly over the tin only to come back a few hours later to discover small dark spots on the surface of the leather. At first I thought it was possibly mold or something similar, but after some research I found that the tannins in leather can react with iron. I used plastic wrap over the tin for the other pouches, and other than one or two spots it fixed the problem. Lemon juice, being an acid, can also help reduce these spots.

A bit more of the process:

Someday I'll get one of those fancy sets that allows you to stamp full words at once instead of one letter at a time.

Glueing to the back.

Marking out the flap.

I usually like to keep my workbench open and cleared off as I'm working, but it ends up like this during random projects.

The completed pouches. The last three images show the rough prototype pouch.